Verizon will bring femtocells to market in 2009 that work with any Verizon handsets

Many cell phone users find that indoor coverage can be spotty at best. Dead spots inside homes or offices make it hard to get a signal and talk without interference or dropped calls. This is especially problematic for users who only use cell phones.

Verizon isn’t the only cellular provider that is offering femtocells. Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer femtocells to customers. The femtocell connects the cellular phone of a user to the broadband internet connection in a home or office to route calls over the internet.

Like any other VOIP service, call quality is likely to be affected by the available bandwidth on the network at the time. Sprint's femtocell is far from the bargain users will hope for at $99.99 for the hardware and an additional $10 to $20 per month for the privilege of using the femtocell.

T-Mobile also offers a femtocell-like service from called HotSpot@Home and requires a special handset to use whereas the Sprint and coming Verizon femtocells will work with any handset. Verizon is still mum on how much its femtocell will cost and what fees the femtocell will carry monthly. Pricing is likely to be in line with what Sprint charges for its femtocell service.

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I'm following you now (and I didn't realize that you authored the posts), however you'll probably remember that ATM fees used to exist, and many banks still charge them. Your bank isn't providing them free to you because they want some amicable relationship with you. They're doing it to compete and differentiate with their competitors. Banks (and every other business) are there to make money. If they could get you to pay ATM fees, you damn well better believe they would. Now apply that logic to cell phone companies. Until market forces push them to offering discounts, they'll charge as much as people are willing to pay.

Well, the ATM fee analogy doesn't really fly here, as that would be akin to YOUR ISP charging you for making calls on the cell company network via this femtocell.

My bank doesn't charge me fees to use their ATM, and they don't charge me fees to use other ATMs. OTHER banks charge me fees to use their ATMs, which is akin to roaming on your cellphone. You're paying to use someone else's network. But, because ISPs don't (can't, at least policy-wise) filter your data with tiered charges for different types of data, there is no roaming. All it is is benefit to the cell company.

And I think the ATM analogy does hold. The cost of the ATM itself is something the bank had to pay for, much like the hardware for femtocells costs money. In addition, the cell companies have to add capabilities within their networks to handle the transition from internet traffic to their voice networks (however they choose to do that). This is comparable to a bank requiring larger data capabilities for all of these remote terminals executing transactions. Neither of these are free, and as a result, they'll charge you for them. As more people begin to offer the same service, they'll use price as a means of differentiation.

When I made the original analogy I was talking about how banks use to charge customers a yearly fee just to have an ATM card . Not the per use fee you get charged when using another bank's ATM. You guys might be too young to remember, but when ATM's first came out just having the card cost $5/month or more.